{"id":2156,"date":"2020-12-04T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-04T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/news\/stories\/when-the-floods-came\/"},"modified":"2024-05-20T16:06:08","modified_gmt":"2024-05-20T23:06:08","slug":"when-the-floods-came","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/news\/stories\/when-the-floods-came\/","title":{"rendered":"When the Floods Came"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n    \n                                \n\n  \n    \n\n\n\n\n\n\n<div\n  class=\"cc--component-container cc--article-hero \"\n\n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  >\n  <div class=\"c--component c--article-hero\"\n    \n      >\n\n    \n<div class=\"inner-wrapper\">\n          \n<div class=\"f--field f--image\">\n\n    \n    \n    \n    \n    \n    \n              \n      <img\n                            data-src=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2023\/04\/story-3357-768x432.jpg\"\n          data-srcset=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2023\/04\/story-3357-768x432.jpg 768w\"          data-sizes=\"(min-width:1200px) 75vw, (min-width:768px) 83vw, 100vw\"          class=\"lazyload\"\n        \n                  alt=\"When the Floods Came\"\n        \n        \n                                      \/>\n\n    \n    \n  \n  \n\n<\/div>\n  \n      <div class=\"image-caption\">\n          \n<div class=\"f--field f--description\">\n\n    \n  Environmental historian Will Cowan is proposing solutions to protect California from future flooding. (Illustrations by Agata Nowicka for USC Dornsife Magazine.)\n\n\n<\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  \n  <div class=\"text-wrapper\">\n          <nav aria-label=\"Breadcrumb\" class=\"breadcrumbs\">\n        <ul>\n                      <li><a href=\"\/news\/stories\/\">News<\/a><\/li>\n                      <li><a href=\"\/news\/stories\/\/?category=student\">Student<\/a><\/li>\n                  <\/ul>\n      <\/nav>\n    \n              \n<div class=\"f--field f--page-title\">\n\n    \n  <h1>When the Floods Came<\/h1>\n\n\n<\/div>\n    \n          <div class=\"subtitle\">\n            \n<div class=\"f--field f--description\">\n\n    \n  We think of Southern California as arid and drought-ridden, but from 1861 to \u201962, much of it was underwater after a series of deadly winter storms caused widespread devastation and flooding. USC Dornsife history scholar Will Cowan says it could happen again. <strong>[12\u00be min read]<\/strong>\n\n\n<\/div>\n      <\/div>\n    \n           <strong class=\"author-field\"><span >By<\/span><a href=\"mailto:communication@dornsife.usc.edu\">Susan Bell<\/a><\/strong>\n    \n          <span class=\"post-date-field\">December 4, 2020<\/span>\n      <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n  <\/div><\/div>\n\n  \n    \n\n\n\n\n\n\n<div\n  class=\"cc--component-container cc--social-share \"\n\n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  >\n  <div class=\"c--component c--social-share\"\n    \n      >\n\n    \n  <div class=\"content-wrapper\">\n    <span class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list\" style=\"line-height: 32px;\">\n      <span class=\"title\">\n        Share\n      <\/span>\n                        <a class=\"a2a_button_copy_link\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"\/#copy_link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"Link\">\n            <span class=\"a2a_svg a2a_s__default a2a_s_copy_link\">\n              <svg 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cc--rich-text \"\n\n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  >\n  <div class=\"c--component c--rich-text\"\n    \n      >\n\n    \n      \n<div class=\"f--field f--wysiwyg\">\n\n    \n  <p>The day the first drops of winter rain spattered onto the parched earth, Southern California\u2019s ranchers heaved a collective sigh of relief. It was Nov. 14, 1861, and the region was in the grip of a severe drought. The ranchers had been praying feverishly for rain for months. At long last, they thought, as they tipped their faces heavenwards to the dark clouds gathering overhead. Little did they know that they \u2014 along with the rest of the Pacific West \u2014 were about to get far, far more than they had bargained for.<\/p>\n<p>From that day until March 1862, not just Southern California but the entire Pacific Coast was battered by a series of exceptionally intense storms that rolled in relentlessly, one after another, for five long months, creating one of the wettest periods the region has experienced in the past 2,000 years. The succession of cold and warm storms dumped nearly 10 feet of rain in certain parts of California and 60 to 70 inches in many other parts of the state in just 43 days, leaving much of it underwater and bringing flooding all the way down the West Coast, from British Columbia to Baja California.<\/p>\n<address>\u201cSome people have boats and canoes, but people are also using doors, barrels \u2014 anything that floats \u2014 as makeshift rafts.\u201d<\/address>\n<p>The effects were devastating. Up to 1,000 people died in the floods while thousands of animals, including cows, horses and other livestock, perished in the rising waters. Towns and settlements were destroyed and buildings were swept away across California, Nevada and Oregon, as well as communities in what is now Washington, Idaho, Utah and Arizona. In California alone, estimates of property damage ranged in the tens of millions of 1860\u2019s dollars.<\/p>\n<p>In an essay he published on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.zocalopublicsquare.org\/2014\/05\/19\/when-california-was-waterlogged\/chronicles\/who-we-were\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Z\u00f3calo Public Square<\/a>\u00a0based on an eyewitness account of the floods, USC Dornsife\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/hist\/\">history<\/a>\u00a0scholar Will Cowan describes the destruction of the Southern California town of San Salvador in San Bernardino County:<\/p>\n<p><em>Frenzied, the people fled to higher ground along the far bank, saving little more than the soaked clothes slung over their bodies. Some of the last to escape had to swim to safety \u2026 They choked in anguish as the unrelenting Santa Ana River consumed the town, crashing first through the dance hall, melting houses, flushing away cattle, sheep and fowl, the river gentle no longer.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Big Winter<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201cDuring those few months, these storms caused some of the most severe floods, freezes and blizzards that have ever been recorded in the history of the Pacific West,\u201d says Cowan, a doctoral student who is writing the first academic study of what he calls \u201cThe Big Winter of 1862.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In Los Angeles, the L.A. River overflowed and the Pueblo was underwater. L.A.\u2019s ranches were devastated, while the many vineyards along the river were destroyed, buried\u00a0in gritty sand and gravel washed down from the San\u00a0Gabriel Mountains.<\/p>\n<p>Sacramento was hit particularly hard, as was the Central Valley. Both were flooded four or five times that winter, while Indian mounds across the Sacramento Valley, topped by 300-year-old oaks, were completely washed away by the floods, sadly removing much of the Indigenous landscape.<\/p>\n<p>Fishermen caught freshwater fish off the coast of San Francisco after flood waters flowed out into the bay, creating a black plume of fresh water mingled with soil washed out by the rain. Lakes around Puget Sound in Washington froze hard enough for ice skating.<\/p>\n<p>The Santa Ana and San Gabriel rivers overflowed and intertwined. Swollen rivers and streams across the state burst their banks and the majority of the infrastructure on every river was completely washed away, from bridges to levees. People ran to high ground if they could, but many were not so lucky. Cowan notes countless accounts of houses floating down rivers with candles still burning in them and people screaming from windows for help. Others found themselves marooned on the roofs of their homes, where they had clambered to avoid the rising floodwater.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 450px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/migration-uploads\/WhenTheFloodsCame_InStoryA-3357.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"450\" height=\"700\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">(Illustrations: Agata Nowicka.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Swirling around them was a murky, surreal soup containing everything from dressers, pool tables, beds and the water-swollen carcasses of dead cattle to entire barns, lumber mills and once-towering pine and spruce trees. There is even an account of a haystack with livestock perched on it, floating past.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSome people have boats and canoes, but people are also using doors, barrels \u2014 anything that floats \u2014 as makeshift rafts,\u201d Cowan says. \u201cIt looks almost like a\u00a0<em>Mad Max<\/em>\u00a0movie set in the 1800s, where everything\u2019s cobbled together out of broken objects.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Among the biggest heroes in this story, Cowan says, were the steamboat pilots who plucked people off roofs and floating logs and out of trees, rescuing hundreds who otherwise wouldn\u2019t have survived.<\/p>\n<p>In this pre-FEMA era, there was a huge humanitarian response to the victims of the flooding.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPeople are very willing to give what they have,\u201d Cowan says. \u201cSan Francisco takes on thousands of refugees from the Sacramento Valley and donates huge quantities of food and clothing. There are stories of women staying up day and night sewing and putting together care packages.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But for all the heartwarming tales of heroism, generosity and self-sacrifice, there were also heartbreaking reports of human suffering.<\/p>\n<p>One of the most terrifying and terrible accounts, Cowan says, concerns Long Bar, an island on the Yuba River, northeast of Sacramento. A popular mining area, the island was home to some 1,000 Chinese migrants who had built a temple there with a protective drawbridge.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen the floods came, the Chinese miners all go into their temple and raise the drawbridge, but the water eventually rises up above the walls and completely subsumes their town,\u201d Cowan says, noting that 500 Chinese miners are believed to have perished.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, the rain keeps falling. From Redding to Bakersfield \u2014 a distance of 450 miles north to south \u2014 and almost 100 miles across, the Pacific West was submerged.<\/p>\n<p>In all, Cowan estimates two dozen towns and settlements were lost to the floods, never to be rebuilt or relocated, among them Champoeg, Oregon; Fort Boise, on the Snake River in Idaho; and Agua Mansa, which incorporated San Salvador and was the precursor to the Southern California city of Riverside and once a key settlement on the trade route between L.A. and Santa Fe, New Mexico.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe geographic breadth of the effects of this winter is just stunning. That\u2019s part of why I wanted to tell this story,\u201d Cowan says. \u201cThere\u2019s really nothing about each one of these individual storms that was so special, although they were certainly big. It\u2019s that they happened in such quick succession and over such a large geography \u2014 that\u2019s what made them dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>A Potentially Lethal Spigot<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>While the exact cause of these extreme weather conditions is hard to determine with absolute certainty, they probably arose from\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.noaa.gov\/stories\/what-are-atmospheric-rivers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">atmospheric rivers<\/a>\u00a0(ARs) \u2014 high-intensity, high-density channels of water vapor that funnel water across the Pacific Ocean.<\/p>\n<p>When these channels of water vapor crash into the West Coast, butting up predominantly against the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges, they can drop immense amounts of water in rain and snowfall in just a few hours, and bring winds at speeds of more than 60 miles per hour.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe can think of ARs as the spigot that controls the water in the American West,\u201d Cowan says.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat winter, a series of these atmospheric river storms kept rolling in, one after the other, from the Western Pacific,\u201d<br \/>\nCowan says. \u201cThis is tropical water and noticeably warmer than your standard winter storms. So, when the warm rain hits the snow, you get this double whammy of both rainfall\u00a0<em>and<\/em>\u00a0melted snow.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Earth Archive\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 450px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/migration-uploads\/WhenTheFloodsCame_InStoryB-3357.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"450\" height=\"700\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">(Illustrations: Agata Nowicka.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Born in San Bernardino, California, to a teacher and a sheet-metal worker, Cowan grew up in the Mojave Desert.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat was a living laboratory,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019d go out and just observe, which is probably why I\u2019m now so interested in environmental history, ecology and the human experiences of the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Cowan says his desert upbringing and his Uchinanchu background \u2014 his maternal grandmother was born in the Ryukyu Islands \u2014 encouraged him to form a deep connection with the landscape.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI spent so much time outdoors with my parents and with my maternal grandparents, in their gardens learning about traditional foods and plant medicine,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s something that has been part of my life for a very long time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After earning a history degree from the University of\u00a0\u00a0California, Riverside, in 2003, Cowan worked at a variety of jobs, including teaching at a public school, playing music and driving a forklift, before historian and urban theorist Mike Davis suggested he contact USC Dornsife\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/cf\/faculty-and-staff\/faculty.cfm?pid=1003206\">William Deverell<\/a>,\u00a0professor of history and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/spatial.usc.edu\/\">spatial sciences<\/a>\u00a0and director of the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/icw\">Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBill was one of the few folks who right away understood my vision for the project and thought it was an urgent history to tell,\u201d says Cowan.<\/p>\n<p>Describing himself as a historian first and an amateur geoscientist second, Cowan has taken courses in forest ecology, fire ecology, California vegetation and climate change.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs an environmental historian, I hate to limit myself to only written documents but try to use any evidence that helps us get closer to knowing what happened and why,\u201d he says. \u201cFor me, learning to read the landscape is as important as learning how to navigate the archives.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In his research, Cowan relies on typical sources, such as letters, diaries and newspapers, but also integrates tree-ring studies and sea-floor and lake core samples, using research by USC Dornsife\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/cf\/faculty-and-staff\/faculty.cfm?pid=1019695\">Sarah Feakins<\/a>, associate professor of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/earth\/\">Earth sciences<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSome folks will say, \u2018How do you know this really\u00a0happened?\u2019 because newspapers in the 19th century did tend to exaggerate,\u201d Cowan says. \u201cMy research shows there are not only firsthand accounts of people who experienced it,\u00a0but there\u2019s also what I like to call \u2018The Earth Archive\u2019 \u2014\u00a0data embedded in our landscape, whether in trees, riverbeds or the ocean floor, that can give us a very\u00a0accurate history of wet and dry periods \u2014 and 1862 was historically, extraordinarily wet.\u201d<\/p>\n<address>\u201cFor me, learning to read the landscape is as important as learning how to navigate the archives.\u201d<\/address>\n<p><strong>An Altered Landscape<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The implications of the floods were far-reaching for the people, towns and settlements affected. Sacramento built levees and raised the level of the city by 10 feet. An ill-advised attempt to create a levee by building a wall down the middle of the Sacramento River was doomed to failure.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere was a lot of hubris involved, but it was that hubris that helped them develop the flood control systems that now protect the city,\u201d Cowan says.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThrough the major channelization and damming projects of the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1930s, we pretty much put the rivers of the West in a straitjacket. And for very good reason, when you see how damaging these floods can be.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But flood prevention measures have also dramatically reshaped our landscape, and the consequences of that, Cowan says, are something we should think hard about.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFrom Mount Shasta all the way down to Bakersfield, basically the whole Central Valley was one stretch of water,\u201d Cowan says. \u201cFor instance, before it was drained \u2014 a project begun following the floods \u2014 the now nonexistent Lake Tulare, at one time the largest body of water west of the Great Lakes, covered 700 square miles, stretching several hundred miles long and some 50 miles wide.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDepending on the season, one could take a steamboat from San Francisco to where Bakersfield is now,\u201d Cowan notes. \u201cBefore the arrival of European settlers, the Central Valley was a maze of wetlands, rivers and Native villages, not at all like we see it today as this big, often dry, dusty, agricultural zone.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Looking Forward<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Could California succumb to such disastrous flooding in the future? Cowan warns that it could.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe latest research on atmospheric rivers tells us that it\u2019s only a matter of time,\u201d he says. As the climate warms, air can hold more moisture, thus making ARs more potent. More powerful ARs could lead to more powerful storms, potentially compromising our flood control systems.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMost of the Army Corps people tell us they believe that the current infrastructure will hold, that we\u2019ll easily handle a 200-year flood event. But my fear again isn\u2019t so much about one storm, it\u2019s if we get several storms in a row, as occurred in 1861\u201362.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As Cowan points out, if the reservoirs are filled after one or two very wet storms and then we have a third, where will that water go?<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf a rapid succession of strong storms flow through the system, it will not be able to move the water or absorb it fast enough to avoid an overflow,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs Californians, we\u2019re in the Ring of Fire and of course should be concerned with earthquakes, but I also think that we should be concerned about atmospheric rivers and the potential for these giant floods that would bring with them the danger of landslides, high winds and heavy snow.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Cowan raises the possibility of an ARkStorm (Atmospheric River 1,000 Storm) \u2014 a hypothetical but\u00a0\u00a0scientifically realistic \u201cmegastorm\u201d scenario developed and published by the Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project of\u00a0\u00a0the United States Geological Survey. Based on historical events, it describes an extreme storm that could devastate\u00a0much of California, causing up to $725 billion in losses, mainly from flooding, and affecting a quarter of\u00a0California\u2019s homes.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s predicted to cost three times what one big earthquake would cause in terms of infrastructure damage and economic losses,\u201d Cowan says.<\/p>\n<p>The name \u201cARkStorm\u201d reflects the original projection of the storm as a 1-in-1000-year event. However, more recent data suggests that the actual frequency of the event is likely to be in the 200-year range.<\/p>\n<p>Cowan notes that the 2016\u201317 winter was the wettest on record in 122 years. The rainfall that season was nearly equivalent to that of 1861\u201362, but the timing of the storms was different in critical ways. The storms of 2016\u201317 were spaced further apart, allowing time for runoff to infiltrate the ground or flow through the system.<\/p>\n<p>After studying the history of the great storms of 1861\u201362, Cowan is proposing solutions to protect California from both future floods and drought.<\/p>\n<p>Instead of having a water management system that\u00a0flushes rainwater to the ocean as fast as possible, perhaps we can develop a more hybridized system that will still protect neighborhoods and agricultural land from overflows, but allows some flooding to remain on the land, he suggests.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSpillways and sponge-like wetlands can become both a flood mitigator, absorbing tons of rainwater, while also helping recharge aquifers for times of drought.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Understanding this history is clearly of vital importance, he stresses, both in grasping the climate challenges we are facing, educating the public about ARs and, as these storms bring fresh water to the West, also creating a sustainable water future.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI don\u2019t want to be a doom-and-gloomer,\u201d Cowan says of his warning that California could face devastating floods in the future, \u201cbut I do feel very strongly that we need to be paying a lot more attention to this atmospheric phenomenon and its history.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/magazine\/the-memory-issue\/\"><em>Read more stories from USC Dornsife Magazine \u2019s Fall 2020\/Winter 2021 issue &gt;&gt;<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n  <\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We think of Southern California as arid and drought-ridden, but from 1861 to \u201962, much of it was underwater after a series of deadly winter storms caused widespread devastation and flooding. USC Dornsife history scholar Will Cowan says it could happen again. <strong>[12\u00be min read]<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":2159,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[66,159,71,557],"class_list":["post-2156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-student","tag-climate-change","tag-earth-sciences","tag-history","tag-huntington-usc-institute-on-california-and-the-west"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>When the Floods Came<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/news\/stories\/when-the-floods-came\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"When the Floods Came\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"We think of Southern California as arid and drought-ridden, but from 1861 to \u201962, much of it was underwater after a series of deadly winter storms caused widespread devastation and flooding. USC Dornsife history scholar Will Cowan says it could happen again. 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